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This study explores how young people's engagement with history outside of the classroom shapes the development of their historical consciousness. Drawing on public discourses around the First World War (WW1), I address the implications of this engagement for history teachers and young peoples' learning. Recognising the active and dynamic construction of memory and meaning by young people, I develop the concept of social remembering. Building on socio-cultural perspectives, I examine the 'lived experience' of young people's memory work. Using WW1 as a context, and adopting an innovative mixed methods approach, the research was conducted over two stages. The first stage of the research used a quiz and survey to explore the extent and nature of young people's social remembering. In the second stage of the study I examined young people's memory work outside the classroom. I worked with several small groups of students to construct their own ethnographic accounts of societal and familial remembering and their emerging historical consciousness, fashioning these into ethnographic portraits. The research highlights the role that social remembering plays in young people's identities, including the ways in which they value and use history, attribute historical significance to events and orientate themselves in time. It shows how different forms of social remembering can both include or exclude young people and impact positively or negatively on young people's historical consciousness. An understanding of social remembering outside the classroom can support history teachers in the development of pedagogies that build on students' meaning making associated with public events such as commemorations. I argue that teachers can use the intersections between social remembering and disciplinary history to engage and support students in their study of history. Although the study originated within the context of history education, it has wider value, offering a ground breaking methodological approach to exploring young people's understandings of the past and in contributing to the historiography of historical memory.

A major educational crisis has been transpiring among fourth and fifth grade boys over the last twenty years (Eliot, 2009; Whitmire, 2010). On average, fourth and fifth grade boys, regardless of racial background or socioeconomic class, are performing below girls, both academically in reading and writing. The Center on Educational Policy reports that boys are approximately ten percent behind girls in reading aptitude and standardized reading tests in all fifty states (Claiborne & Siegel, 2010; Carty, 2010; www.cep-dc.org), with boys continuing to lag behind girls in reading achievement in most countries (Newkirk, 2002; Zambo & Brozo, 2009). This dissertation seeks to examine the degree to which the presence or absence of gender-differentiated English Language Arts resources, curriculum and instructional techniques used with fourth and fifth grade boys can help explain the crisis. The focus is not to create gender-neutral classrooms, but rather to acknowledge the academic, psychological and physical needs of boys, therefore producing gender differentiation with coeducational classrooms. This dissertation focuses on fourth and fifth grade boys because they are at the academic stage at which tasks within English Language Arts instruction, such as reading to learn non-fictional information, become more challenging (Zambo & Brozo, 2009; Gurian, Stevens & Daniels, 2009). The methodology employed examines how fourth and fifth grade boys are unintentionally discriminated against within the elementary school classroom based on the use of several Newbery and Caldecott medal-winning books, Treasures text selections, New York State Standardized English Language Arts test reading and listening passages, as well as the common core state standards within reading, writing, speaking and listening. Each of these English Language Arts artifacts was reviewed for gender appeal using a contextual evaluation tool. The findings indicate that even though the literacy resources used within elementary schools largely meet the criteria to appeal to the boyhood culture, awareness by teachers and administrators must be a priority during the selection. The common core state standards were found to be lacking in gender differentiation; therefore I developed boyhood enhancements that would simultaneously support girls. Still, additional factors contributing to this gender achievement gap in literacy of boys must be further researched. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]